Ancestral Puebloans did not have metal, but used materials available from their environment. They made tools for grinding, cutting, pounding, chopping, perforating, scraping, polishing, and weaving from stone, bone, and wood.

They used digging sticks for farming, stone axes for clearing land, bows and arrows for hunting, and sharp edged stones for cutting. They ground corn with the mano and metate and made wooden spindle whorls for weaving. They fashioned awls for sewing and scrapers for working animal hides from bone. They usually made their stone tools from stream cobbles rather than the soft, cliff sandstone.